Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints

Last week, at the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, I had a chance to see the latest film by one of the world’s best documentarians, Kim Longinotto. In Pink Saris, she tells the story of the ‘Pink Gang’ of women in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states. Led by a tough lady named [...]

It’s film festival season in Montreal, and I have seen quite a few films. I am often struck by how much it takes to make a really excellent doc. A good subject or a worthy cause are only the most basic starting points. A good story is one step better, but far from a guarantee [...]

The normal progression for a budding filmmaker has generally been from student films and shorty shorts towards longer shorts, and then medium-length films and finally feature length ones. Working on the short films, he or she would learn the ropes, learn how to use equipment and tell a story. Later on, with more resources, would [...]

Barry Greenwald’s terrific documentary The Experimental Eskimos reveals an extraordinary attempt at social engineering. The film follows three Inuit, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona, who, as 12-year-old boys, were shipped South in the early 1960s from their homes in the Canadian Arctic to attend white public schools in Ottawa. The consequences for their [...]

I have just spent two weeks teaching at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington State. More on my course another day, but I also had the opportunity to speak to the students and faculty about Documentary in the Context of Globalization. I talked about how the new digital technologies have democratized access to audio-visual production [...]

I come from a family of teachers and the artists. From the former, in particular my mother Kerstin and her father Effe, I learned about the value of intellectual curiosity and learning. From the artists I feel I learned not just about aesthetics, but also about the value of a creative interpretation of the world [...]

This week: following my previous post on the NFB‘s multi-platform project GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis, here is an interview with Hélène Choquette, the project’s director and coordinator. The above image is pulled from the excellent photo essay, Poetic Justice – one of Hélène’s own compositions – featuring the young [...]

Pioneering cinematographer Dziga Vertov (the Camera Eye) dreamed of an omnipresent camera, one which could look at reality from all angles and at all times. Could he ever have imagined today’s reality, with everyone recording video on their cameras and cell phones? As Quebec filmmaker Philippe Falardeau says, we are in the age of “tout [...]

This week at Sunny Side of the Doc at La Rochelle, the NFB and Arte.tv France announced a collaboration for the production of webdocumentaries. They will produce one documentary per year, with a budget of $100,000 CDN. The two companies already have considerable experience with webdocs. For almost a year, the NFB has hosted a [...]

Last Friday night, Ole Gjerstad‘s and Joelie Sanguya‘s film Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths premiered at the Cinéma Parallèle as part of the Présence autochtone aboriginal film festival. Co-produced by Piksuk Media Inc. and the National Film Board of Canada, the film won the Rigoberta Menchu Second Prize at the 20th First Peoples’ Festival [...]